The Wolver/Chapter 5
V
French Louie was as much a part of the wilderness as moose or wolf or fisher. He had certain habits, just as the wild creatures have certain habits; he had certain notions, just as they have certain notions. He differed from other trappers just as Two Toes differed from other wolves, or as an old silver fox differs from an old red fox.
Just as an old wolf seeks the deeper wilderness, French Louie sought the country unfrequented by his own kind. An old trapper is a good deal of a recluse and miser in his work, however fond he may be of people when his work is done.
The lines that French Louie ran through the green timber were beautiful specimens of woodcraft. They followed easy grades. They took advantage of flats, hillsides, level ridge-backs, gaps in mountain ranges, and narrow gorges over streams where two poles would serve for a safe bridge. At the same time every line he ran cut through the heart of the ranges of the fur colonies.
There was something uncanny in the certainty with which he struck into the valleys where the mink were most plentiful, into the land of broken rocks where the lynx followed the cliffs of stone, up the long slopes where the fisher, far wanderers, were sure to roam, and through the mountain gaps where all the woods life was certain to pass and repass the engines of destruction which it was his business to lay in the way of the fur-wearers.
It was the wolves, however, above all others, that felt the prescience of French Louie. They found his lines laid into their favorite hunting-grounds. There was a big pack of fourteen wolves up Swallow River way. They hunted in a great swamp up from the lake—and French Louie's route skirted that swamp.
In their lighter moments the Swallow River wolves would romp and play along the sand beach just south of the mouth of Wolf River. French Louie ran a line down to that neighborhood. They used a low gap through the rock ridge on the south of Swallow River Valley. French Louie's path did not go through that gap—of course not! But his lines touched both ends of it.
Away inland there was a pack of wolves which had never seen a man. They had smelled only a few mild specimens who crossed the Hudson Bay Trail north out of Michipicoten, and once in a while two or three who ventured up one of the rivers into their hunting country. Right across their range, from side to side, was now slashed a human whose odor raised the hair on those wolves' backs and made them utter low, angry growls.
So it was with twelve or fifteen packs which had lived for many years on the east shore, in the territory between Michipicoten and Pic River—a hundred and twenty miles along the lake shore, and containing five thousand square miles of wilderness, from the burned blueberry lands along the railroad to the pole-spruce knolls deep in the broken stone country, where the gallop of a scared moose could be heard a mile when his antlers were hard, for the striking and pounding of his horns against the standing timber.
The mere presence of a man in that region was a suspicion that changed the habits of the wolves the day they found that he was there. They ran at night. The bold hunters who had been stirring around more or less in the daytime now retreated to thickets, and stayed in them during most of the hours when formerly they had roamed freely.
Some young and inexperienced wolves did not understand. Some of them were natural born stupids. As a result, these were the first to feel the onslaught of French Louie. It was the fate of four pups that helped other wolves to learn something of the menace that was upon them.
These pups hunted through the easy going of a swamp just north of Twin Falls River. They lived back from the lake, in a territory of bare, glacier-rounded stone tops and deep, heavily timbered gullies. They slept up on the sides of the rocky knolls, under little bushes, on the lee side when the breeze was cold, and on the warm side when the sun was out. They might just as well have been deer fawns, for all they knew about coping with a wolver who understood all the arts of still-hunting for wolves.
French Louie, blazing his lines across the green-timber land, had found more wolf-tracks than he had ever seen before; more signs of moose and rabbit and grouse, which accounted for the presence of so many wolves; more traces of fisher, mink, fox, and lynx, too, for that matter, but particularly he saw the wolf-tracks.
"Now, by gar!" he exulted. "I keep my eye peeled, an' I peel some tam good wolfs, I bet, by gar!"
French Louie was an old-fashioned trapper, but he carried up-to-date, weapons. During this line-blazing, trap-setting period he toted a twenty-two-caliber repeating rifle. With this he could kill all the bait that he needed for traps in which he used meat—birds, rabbits, squirrels, and the like.
He carried hooks and lines, however, to catch fish for certain of his sets which required fish for their perfection of temptation. For many traps he carried no bait at all, but made blind sets—the deadliest sets of all for certain classes of animals.
In his belt he had a "pistol," which shot a thirty-caliber bullet and had a range of several hundred yards. This was not a hunting weapon, though he could kill game with it, if he desired. It was a weapon of defense which French Louie had to have—and lack of which has left many a trapper to fall before the rush of a pack of hungry wolves. There were several wolves in this green timber country which had tasted and liked the flesh of man. Two of them were in Two Toes's pack.
While French Louie was working—while he was blazing his lines, building the wigwams and cubbies, and brushing the trails—he had little time to hunt. He made enough noise in the woods to alarm the wild game. He startled the moose from their beds, and the wolves heard him long before he came in sight of them.
But when it was time to set the traps, all the noisy work was done. With low-barking twenty-two-caliber shells, French Louie killed rabbits and grouse for bait—occasionally a red squirrel, too—slipping through the woods as silently as a wolf itself.
Having hung up and frozen rabbits and grouse along his line, he left the little twenty-two repeater at home on some trips, and carried, instead, his "wolf gun." This was a twenty-two-caliber rifle shooting a bullet at twenty-eight hundred feet a second, or thereabouts. When the bullet hit a wolf, it exploded like a snowball against a rock.
With that rifle French Louie became a hunter as well as a trapper. He slipped away from his line and circled over to the wolf runways that he had discovered—the gaps through the ridges, the old burnings, and the bare knolls where young wolves enjoyed the sun. His trails were blazed for his traps, but he by no means kept to the trails. He would hurry over them, and often, because his wigwams were near together, he would steal two or three hours a day for hunting—for "wolfing," as he called it.
He did not disdain to kill a fox, a marten, a fisher, if he met one. But his main object was to kill wolves, and he hunted where his instinct, developed by fifty years of wilderness work, told him that wolves would lie.
So he crossed Twin Rock River and skirted the edge of the swamp, where young wolves were sure to be hunting rabbits and grouse. He found where they followed up a ravine of easy grade, making a veritable runway with their narrow claws and paws. He could tell by the way they scrambled along that; they were young wolves—even if he had not recognized their youth by the prints they made in the mud and sand.
Back among the rounded granite tops he grinned to himself.
"By gar! Dem wolfs is lie in the sun, an' warm theirselfs! By gar, I bet I warm dem up, too, if I see dem, quick!"
He circled around among the stone knolls, and peeked and peered and blinked. He hunted down the warm rays of sunshine. With his back to the sun, he stood in his own shadow, while the animals ahead of him would stand out in the bright light. That was the first strategy of his wolfing.
Raising his head above the level crest of a mossy granite top, he looked seventy yards away to the sunny side of another granite top. Between was a ravine so deep that the trees in it did not rise to the level of the rocks. On the opposite hill grew some dwarf spruces, surrounded by shrubs and deep moss.
There, gray and plain in the sunshine, against the background of dark green and purple, were two wolves, about ten feet apart. A little beyond there was another wolf, and a fourth was idly scratching his sleepy ear where a belated bluebottle fly had annoyed his comfort.
French Louie pressed his lips firmly together, for fear he would shout with exultation. He drew up the fatal white bead and caught it against the side of the scratching wolf, through the round ring behind the breech. He pressed the trigger. The wolf was thrown violently against the shrubs behind him, and halfway through them.
Up sprang the other three wolves, and French Louie struck one of them with death before they had blinked twice in the blinding sunshine. A third wolf he picked off as it turned frantically; the fourth he missed because of Gallic excitement and exultation, as it threw itself sidewise and endwise over the crest of stone and out of sight.
The beast that escaped was now a candidate for admittance to Two Toes's band of wit-sharpened wolves!